Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today launched a new family of converged infrastructure systems: Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) CI. Concurrently, the company introduced the next generation of its management automation and orchestration software for the Hitachi UCP family of systems: Hitachi UCP Advisor 2.0. Together, they provide a flexible, high-performance enterprise-class platform that unites best-in-class storage, compute and networking with sophisticated and extensible automation and management software. This combination provides foundational support for next-generation digital solutions that help to solve enterprise customers' most complex data management, mobility and analysis challenges.

Hitachi's UCP CI systems and UCP Advisor Software deliver a modern, integrated data-centric framework that can help enterprises more agilely respond to rapidly changing business and market demands. They provide comprehensive support for customers' existing virtualization, database and analytics applications, offering a turnkey solution to deploy enterprise applications faster, with improved performance, higher uptime, simplified troubleshooting and enhanced security features. This can result in lower operational costs, reduced complexity and risk, and better utilization of an enterprise's most strategic asset-their data-to deliver better customers experiences and identify new business models and revenue streams.

"Enterprise executives looking to implement digital transformation initiatives need to ensure they have modern, agile IT capabilities to drive increased efficiencies and better manage continual change in their organizations," says Bob Madaio, vice-president, infrastructure solutions marketing at Hitachi Vantara. "Hitachi's converged infrastructure systems provide critical foundational support for IT modernization and deliver a flexible environment to help our customers to fully exploit cloud, open source and emerging technologies, such as advanced analytics and artificial intelligence at the core."

Notable advancements and benefits of Hitachi UCP Advisor software include:

• Simplified deployment through the automated provisioning of physical and virtual environments while minimizing downtime with automated lifecycle management, health alerts and monitoring.
• Extensible automation enabling integration with datacenter management frameworks.
• Improved efficiency using an intuitive interface providing federated management of UCP converged, hyperconverged and rack scale systems.

Notable advancements and benefits of Hitachi UCP CI systems include:

• Integration with UCP Advisor software for automated management, orchestration and monitoring.
• Combines Hitachi's leading, enterprise-grade Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) storage with sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors to provide a flexible, highly performant and configurable system that's capable of supporting any enterprise application, at any scale, within or across any cloud environment.
• Scales simply from entry-level and proof-of-concept projects to support mission-critical applications and enterprise-wide deployments.
• Delivered as a pre-validated, fully integrated and turnkey system, supports rapid installation to accelerate time to business value.
• Helps users more efficiently and effectively manage, govern and mobilize business data assets, both on-premises and in cloud environments.

The new Hitachi UCP Advisor software and UCP CI systems represent the next step in the evolution of Hitachi Vantara's fully refreshed and expanded UCP portfolio. The new portfolio includes rack-scale UCP RS systems, based on VMware Cloud Foundation, and hyperconverged UCP HC systems, now enabled with nonvolatile memory (NVMe) acceleration, which were introduced earlier this year. UCP Advisor 2.0 software can be used in conjunction with any of these new UCP systems to provide simplified data management, orchestration and improve operational efficiencies.

"At the core of modern data strategies is the need to increase the value derived from business data and drive competitive advantage through ubiquitous data services-from any source, any application and on any cloud. This new data model underscores the requirement for modern IT infrastructures that ensure data can be efficiently managed, governed, mobilized and analyzed to extract richer insights, drive better decision-making and support better business outcomes," said Iri Trashanski, senior vice president, market development and product management at Hitachi Vantara. "Any customer considering or in the midst of a digital transformation initiative will benefit from Hitachi's converged and hyperconverged infrastructure systems, which have been built to deliver the composable, flexible foundation, automation and seamless experience required to support their success."

Product Availability and Information
UCP CI systems are available globally now. The next-generation UCP Advisor 2.0 software will be generally available later this year. For more information, visit: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/products/converged-systems/unified-compute-platform-ci-series.html.